Gyms in China’s capital city of Beijing were forced to close again over the weekend, adding pressure to an industry that’s already seen the collapse of thousands of fitness businesses nationwide, CNBC reports.
The coronavirus, which emerged late last year in the Chinese city of Wuhan, has swept across the country and only started slowing down in early March. That allowed some fitness centers — which have essentially shut down since late January — to re-open in the last few weeks. But a new case of Covid-19 in Beijing last week increased concerns about a resurgence of the virus, turning a major business and residential district into the highest-risk region in the country.
Already, more than 200 fitness businesses shuttered in Beijing in the first quarter, according to analysis from Qichacha, which runs a Chinese business information database.
Nationwide, the data showed China’s ballooning fitness industry got hit so hard by the coronavirus that 6,969 businesses in the field dissolved or suspended operations in the first three months of this year — far more than the 4,632 in all of 2015. There were 955,000 fitness companies in operation across China as of April 17, according to Qichacha.
